If you can catch it, you can keep it.

There are many wonderful things about Germany. If I were to write about them I could go on for hours, so I'll save you the trouble of reading all that and tell you what Max thinks is so wonderful about Germany. His list is a lot shorter than mine and it can be summed up in one word - wildlife. This place is chock full of wildlife, probably because Germans actually care about their environment and haven't polluted the heck out of their land like we have. But I digress. If you add in the neighborhood cats (including one feral tripod of a cat) Max has seen no less than 7 types of wildlife since we've been here, though he has caught sight of other things I did not see. His list of sightings includes deer, hedgehogs, some kind of squirrel, some other kind of squirrel sized ground rodent, birds, moles, voles, and the aforementioned cats. I myself have seen three additional animals that Max did not see: some sort of peccary, a fox, and a scheltopusik, a kind of legless lizard. To both myself and Max, Germany is some kind of animal wonderland. To further substantiate that claim I must add that the local zoo allows dogs, so Max has even seen an alpaca, though I hardly consider that wildlife. Anyway, Max's favorite pastime of late, since the farmers began harvesting their crops, is going for a walk in the grassy fields that border most of the farmland. Hidden within these fields are droves of voles (say that three times fast). To make things exciting for Max, the voles like to dash from one hole to another when they think they are being threatened. Well, Max is a terrier so the voles are being threatened often. He will run around the field like crazy, nose down and head flipping from side to side, until he finds the most likely smelling hole. At that point he stuffs his nose in there to get a really good sniff, then he starts digging like mad. Pause for another sniff and then dig some more. When he gets really excited and thinks he's close to a catch he will bite out chunks of dirt from the far side of the hole. Usually he doesn't catch anything, but a couple of times now he has. Squeamish and pregnant readers may wish to discontinue reading at this point. The first time he caught something Darin and I made him leave it, even though he had already killed it. I felt bad but rationalized that it would be eaten later the evening by a fox. The second time, however, I let Max have it. He caught it, he was willing to eat it, and it probably wouldn't harm him any. It's not like he's not used to raw food by now and it doesn't get any more raw than that. He scarfed the whole thing, not even stopping to pull out the guts like he did on the first. Well, I can tell you, those of you who have watched your child do something big for the first time, use the potty, say their first word, I don't know what, you can understand how proud I felt of my boy. This is what he was bred to do and he's good at it! Really good. Darin and I will point out what looks like a likely hole to us and he'll just race on by to go to a different hole and, sure enough, within moments there are voles running everywhere, fleeing for their lives, afraid of the jaws of doom on MY BOY. Yes, I'm a proud momma.